


Brothers of White Glass

by KaiserJo



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe, Immortality Angst, Multi, Silas becomes a lyctor, Will he survive five minutes? Unlikely
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:28:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27782254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KaiserJo/pseuds/KaiserJo
Summary: Silas Octakiseron finds himself in an un-winnable fight against Ianthe, with only one way out. The consequences of his choice will change him beyond imagining.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	Brothers of White Glass

Silas Octakiseron fell heavily to earth. An undignified grunt escaped his—now bloody—mouth, as the shock of his fall gave way to a rush of pain. Having just unexpectedly travelled through a series of deeply gross thanergetic portals, courtesy of Ianthe Tridentarius, Silas attempted desperately to organise his thoughts. As he rose to once again face the third house witch, he did not want to think about the pink, red and yellow that now stained his robes. He did not want to think about the gore under his fingernails, or the fact that he could not tell the source of the blood that now filled his mouth. The necromancers of the eighth house had always disdained flesh magic, preferring the clean and the utilitarian. Silas wouldn’t have gotten far in necromancy without a strong stomach, but he was inappropriately conscious of how long he would have to spend scrubbing his hands and face before he felt truly clean again.

It was with this rising revulsion that he looked upon Ianthe Tridentarius, upright and alive. He looked upon his rapidly greying cavalier. He looked upon the Sixth and the Ninth houses, both unable and unwilling to intervene. Silas Octakiseron realised how deeply fucked he was. But the eighth house was not built on half measures. The education drilled into him by the ministers of the White Glass gleamed dimly in his hippocampus, like a jewel through rising smoke. 

“If your opponent is stronger than you, use that to your advantage. Turn their power into overconfidence. Make their strength the chain you will use to bind them.”

Silas breathed deeply, and clenched his fists, focussing on the body of Ianthe Tridentarius. Once he encountered the presence of his opponent, a deep dread grabbed his guts and yanked them out of him. Ianthe was a simple absence of information, a void of thanergy. He could feel the power emanating from her, but when he searched for its source, he found walls and darkness. Ianthe had claimed lyctorhood, and now Silas knew she truly had done exactly what she said she had. As his conscious mind rapidly nose-dived, Silas’ muscles and joints acted on years of practise and memory. The siphoning began, and somehow, started to draw power out of Ianthe’s void. He noted with hollow relief that though Ianthe had completely masked her thanergetic signatures, she was not entirely able to prevent him siphoning that thanergy. 

“Octakiseron,” Ianthe drawled, “you can’t take it faster than I can make it.” 

Cringing at the—if increasingly justified—rhyming self-aggrandisement, Silas focussed entirely on the pressure of siphoning. The thanergy he pulled from Ianthe crashed over him like a waterfall. It was more power than he had ever felt, more than he knew he could bear. At the technical level, it was like removing the batteries from a pocket flashlight, and plugging it directly into a nuclear reactor. At the level of Silas’ consciousness, it had rendered him incapable of complex necromancy—simply mastering the power would require more complexity than his training had ever prepared him for. 

Out of the corner of his eye, Silas saw Colum begin to move. With all the zealotry that befitted a templar of the eighth, he smashed his shield directly into Ianthe’s face. For a moment Silas thought Ianthe would collapse, like a normal human being, but of course she did not. Indeed, she met the follow up strike with an open hand. The blood that coated her fingers seemed to catch the blade, and she gracefully swept it aside. 

Under the constant onslaught of these terrible sights, and the piling weight of his own poor decisions, Silas began to lose it. He hated Ianthe for being damn invincible. He hated Colum for pushing back against him at the worst possible time. He hated teacher, the priests and the entire slimy contents of Canaan house for failing so dismally to meet his expectations. In this moment of pure, animal rage, he hated the God he had worshipped his entire life. The God who had set this whole perverse charade in motion, and offered an apotheosis that was deeply wrong and entirely hypocritical. His was the house of mercy, but he had no mercy left. He continued to siphon. 

He only recalled later the strange behaviour of the third house necromancer. Silas was too focussed on surviving the raw power he was pulling from Ianthe to notice the anger in her face, and her furious whispers to no one. As Colum brought his sword down in a broad arc across Ianthe’s back, Silas failed even to notice her age and wither, the siphoning finally beginning to weaken her. What Silas did notice—what sent him crashing finally to the very bottom of his emotional well, was Colum. 

“Well, now you’re fucked,” Ianthe pronounced. 

The particular brand of ‘soul siphoning’ Silas used with his cavalier was not the same as that he had used on Ianthe. Instead of draining the thanergy of the human body, a properly trained eighth necromancer was able to push the soul of their cavalier into a state of semi-death, resting just between the river and the mortal world. Here, the soul conducted spirit energy like a lightning rod, which the necromancer could then collect from the body of their cavalier. The danger, of course, was that the hungry ghosts of the river might also try to cross this bridge. Eighth necromancers were well trained in repelling such unwelcome spirits, and prepared to perform on-the-spot exorcisms should the need arise. What Silas was not well trained for, however, was the creatures that dwelt within Canaan House. Teacher had been right to fear them. The ghosts that dwelt here were monstrous and powerful. Twisted by the experiments of ancient lyctors, left to marinade for ten thousand years in their hunger and madness, unable to return to the river. The spirits that smelt Colum’s unoccupied body and advanced on him like dead-eyed sharks had their prize firmly in their jaws.

It was here that Silas died. But his death was a peculiar one, occurring in two stages. When he understood the enormity of his failure, he felt his pride, his ego, his sense of self worth wither like so much burnt incense. This had an oddly calming effect, and his mind began to search for Colum’s soul, as if his cavalier was not now beyond help. To his surprise, he felt him. Colum’s eternal soul still rested on the borders of the river, slipping gradually into the beyond, but still reachable for an adept of the eighth. His mind fell, inexplicably, upon Ianthe’s gloating victory speech, and her explanation of that unholy lyctorhood. Before today, Silas had never felt twenty minutes extend to fill a whole myriad, and yet who he had been before his world collapsed seemed just that distant. 

“Turn their power into overconfidence. Make their strength the chain you will use to bind them.”

Then he knew. 

Colum’s soul could be saved. Silas could survive. The animal rage in his gut could be satisfied. He knew exactly what had to be done. He would turn the sin back on the sinners—he needed to become a lyctor. 

“Step one: Preserve the soul, with intellect and memory intact.”

Silas reached out to Colum across the void. He grasped his cavalier, enfolding him like he was cradling a baby.

“Step two: Analyse it—understand its structure, it shape.”

This was simple enough, Silas had been working with souls his entire necromantic career. He new the shape of Colum more intimately than any other. 

“Step three: Remove and absorb it: take it into yourself without consuming it in the process.”

For this, Silas bastardised the thanergetic siphoning he had used on Ianthe. He established a thanergy gradient, guiding Colum’s soul into a gentle rest next to his own. He held it with as much subtlety as he could muster, like trying to preserve a soap bubble. 

“Step four: Fix it in place where it can’t deteriorate.” 

This stage almost thwarted the whole scheme. Luckily, Silas had glanced at the theorem in this very room as Colum had first engaged Ianthe. He clumsily merged his scattered memory of that theorem with the techniques he used to hold Colum’s soul in state between the river and the mortal world. This felt less like pinning, more like nailing Colum’s soul in place. It was rushed and slap-dash, and he hated it. But Silas was very quickly growing to hate so much of himself.

“Step five, incorporate it: Find a way to make the soul part of yourself without being overwhelmed.”

Silas had already tasted the power of a lyctor. It had very nearly broken him then. But he had not been broken. He braced himself to face the waves once more.

“Step six: Consume the flesh. Not the whole thing, a drop of blood will do to ground you.”

Silas rose from his necromantic focus, withdrawing from the manipulation of Colum’s soul to solve this final problem. It was then that he saw Colum’s body. His cavalier’s eyes were as black as space. His body jerked forward as if bone and muscle and been replaced by hydraulic pistons. The sword gleamed before him, but all Silas could comprehend was the blood that coated Colum’s hands and stained his robes. There was no time to consider who’s blood this was, but the fact that it had not yet dried off gave him hope. He raised a hand, and surprised himself by grasping Colum’s wrist in one swift movement.

However quickly Silas had been to able smear his hands with Colum’s blood, he was not quick enough to stop the blade that now swept toward him. There was no time for a final prayer to the King Undying. Even if there had been, Silas was beginning to doubt in his capacity for faith. His necromantic focus became his substitute prayer. The words of Ianthe Tridentarius echoed in his head like a mantra, or a hymn. He raised his hands to his mouth, as Colum the Eighth’s sword passed through his trachea.

Silas Octakiseron fell heavily to earth. He tasted blood, and the final sparks of activity in his cranium stuttered toward their final act.

“Step Seven is reconstruction—making spirit and flesh work together the way they used to, in a new body.”

This was not hard. Colum had been engineered since birth—before birth—to mesh seamlessly with Silas’ necromancy. Silas was dimly aware now of the painful injustice of that. He had loved Colum his whole life, and Colum’s whole life had been an expression of love for Silas. And for their love they would die together in a bloody heap. 

“And then for the last step you hook up the cables and get the power flowing. You’ll find that one a walk in the park, Eighth.”

Silas began to siphon. The thanergy of Colum’s soul began to warm him. More noticeable, however, was the blood fountaining from his throat. Silas choked and spasmed as the instinctual response so admirably held at bay finally broke through. He moaned in red, bubbling agony. At least he did not die cold. 

Silas woke up.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally published on wattpad, but as I've posted more writing on here, I'm republishing it here!
> 
> Will Silas come in clutch in Alecto? Yes absolutely.


End file.
